fueled bonfires crackled and sent flames high into the sapphire sky.
“Tonight we honor the blood of those fallen,” he said, his voice now lower. “Of all those who have died,
They stared with wide eyes, each remembering those Mortals who’d died in sickness or mishap. They revered passed Mortal life in this way at every Gathering, hearing each as they stood in silence.
Rom spoke their names, seven in all since the last gathering, one a mere child of two, Serena, who’d been struck in the head by a horse’s hoof and died. It wasn’t the Nomadic way to mourn with keening except in private. Every life was sacred. Every name spoken. But in the end they would celebrate, not mourn, them all.
He came to the last two, pacing before them. “The warrior Pasha.”
Still, not a sound.
“The Keeper and third-born, Triphon!”
He let the name linger, knowing that these last two were still fresh in all of their minds and hearts.
“We remember them all with honor, knowing they are alive still.”
His words echoed over the assembly for several long beats as tension mounted. They all knew what would come next.
Avra.
Slowly, he dipped his head once, then turned and looked at the leather bowl suspended on the wooden tripod.
Stirs in the crowd.
Every year a shudder ran through his body when the time came-not for the memory of Avra’s slaying or of the lifeless body he had buried, but for the sacrifice she’d made so that he could live.
He lifted his right hand and held it steady, palm open. A hundred drums began pounding as one in steady rhythm. From the corner of his eye, he saw Zara the councilwoman striding up the steps, a wrapped bundle in her hands. It should have been Triphon, as had become custom.
She set the bundle in his hand and the cadence of the drum beat surged. Blood dripped through the bindings onto his fingers as Zara untied the parcel. It smattered the limestone as she pulled the pouch open before retreating down the steps.
“And then, there is the first martyr,” he said.
Rom reached into the vessel, gripped the organ inside. An equine heart, cut just that morning from one of the horses, the meat of which had been quartered onto the spits. It was the most sacred kind of heart the Nomads knew, standing in now for Avra’s, enshrined in the inner sanctum.
He thrust the fresh, raw heart up into the air.
A resounding roar from the mass below.
“Tonight we honor the first martyr. Who gave up true life to usher in the hope we have before us now!”
The drums stopped.
“For Avra’s heart!”
The Mortals erupted in one resounding cry.
Goose bumps crawled up Feyn’s arms as the entire camp exploded into a fresh riot of celebration, the drums threatening to reorder the beat of her own pulse. They mourned Triphon’s death, not knowing that Saric had found a way to coax life from him yet. Telling them the truth would betray her Master and accomplish no good among these Mortals.
It was Avra’s heart that fascinated her more. She’d laid eyes on the woman outside the Citadel grounds once, in that other lifetime. This woman whom Rom had loved.
“She died?” she said, glancing at Roland.
“The day before you did.” The impassive lines of his face expressed no empathy for the reference to Feyn’s own death at the hands of the very Keeper she now saw wending his way through the back of the gathered celebrants. Did he know she was here, the one he had so brutally cut down and then so carefully preserved? And if she were to come face-to-face with him, what would she say to him, or he to her?
She shifted, thinking of the scar across her torso. It itched. “And Triphon?”
“Killed by your brother’s Dark Bloods days ago.”
Triphon, too, she had met once, if only briefly.
The prince returned his attention to the ruins, making it clear he wasn’t waiting for any sort of a reply.
He had come to her earlier, calling her out from her yurt, saying that it was time. Janus, he had said, would have to remain behind. She could not mistake the lines of mistrust and displeasure etched into the Nomad’s face as she’d followed Roland into camp. She had not needed to be told that it was only Rom’s order that assured her any safety here.
Now they watched together as Rom moved across the elevated ruins to the tripod and carefully set the heart inside the soft leather bowl suspended between the wood supports. How strange to reconcile the naive, impetuous man she had known with the leader who commanded such respect among these wild Mortals. The Rom she’d known had been a poet, an artisan who’d sung at funerals-the lowest kind of fare in the world of Order.
The man at the top of the stairs was a leader of warriors, majestic in his own way.
A man who had kissed her… tasted her…
He was also the enemy of her Maker and therefore hers as well.
Rom turned toward the gathering. He drew a knife from the sheath at his belt. “We remember those lost to us. We remember those who died. And we celebrate, proving with our lives that their blood was not spilled in vain!”
With his last words, he slashed the bottom of the leather bowl. A stream of blood began to flow to the ground.
Bodies were in motion once more, grappling for the sky, the names of Avra, Triphon, and Pasha shouted to the stars. They were fervent, these Mortals, she would give Rom that. Fervent… impassioned…
And as such, more dangerous than she would have guessed.
She glanced at the yurts to her right, each of them lit from inside, with fires burning in the pits outside. Children dashed from one dwelling to another, snagging food from the fires before running toward the cooking pits at the edge of camp.
Where was the boy? She hadn’t seen him anywhere in the crowd or on the ruin steps. He was the one, after all, she had been brought to meet.
She surveyed the assembled Mortals. These were only what… a thousand? Slightly more? But she’d seen the faces of the warriors and had noted their zeal, in such stark contrast to the icy discipline of Saric’s Dark Bloods.
“I can
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“It smells like curiosity. And ambition. And interest.” He turned toward her as he said it. She studied the high and hard line of his cheekbone. The broad forehead, the long, thick braids with their wealth of beading. The paintlike tattoo on his temple. A woman’s finger had painted it, she thought. She wondered what kind of woman kept the interest of a man like this. One as magnificent as he was deadly.
He leaned toward her as though to share her line of sight. “You’re counting what… five, six hundred? There are seven hundred. And twelve hundred of us altogether. Far less than your brother’s army; tell him that. But make no mistake.” He turned to gaze at her, his eyes both heavy-lidded and sultry. “March against us here and we will defeat you.”
A shout went up from the frenetic dancers and echoed through the crowd like a rolling peal of thunder. Feyn turned and saw its cause.
Jonathan. Leaping up the ruin stairs.
He was naked except for a loincloth.
His face was bare of the paint the other warriors wore, and his hair was adorned perhaps the least of any Nomad in the company, but no one seemed to care. The shouts of the throng escalated into a roar unrivaled yet this evening.
Rom embraced the boy, then stepped back, arms spread.
“Your Sovereign!” he cried.
The Mortals roared, a cry so forceful, so full of hope and emotion that Feyn felt tears well in her eyes. What
